Posted
by
Unknown Lameron Monday April 30, 2012 @09:50PM
from the mcdonalds-makes-the-tastiest-burgers dept.

An anonymous reader writes "While the celebs are already charging big money for their Tweets, an Aussie startup is ranking everyday people and turning them into product salespeople. After a successful start Down Under they have now hit Silicon Valley, but will Americans embrace selling to their friends?"
From the article: "In a nutshell, individuals sign up to the Social Loot website and are assigned companies to promote to their circle of online friends. They are then paid on a sliding scale based on the amount of traffic their posts generate, and the quality of referrals and number of resulting sales. This is tracked by a code embedded in the links promoted by Social Loot’s spruikers."

Can't have it both ways. Either free speech, paid or not, or, a form of censorship. Because someone will have to be enforcing the disclosure requirement. and that someone would _have_ to be given authority to investigate any twitterer. On the scale of the internet this is _insane_.

It doesn't really matter -- twitter is cutting their own throat allowing this kind of slimy stuff. It's just a matter of time til everyone knows twitter is for suckers that want to read a bunch of really short astroturf. Plus this kind of behavior is practically eternal. "Caveat Emptor", "a fool and his money are soon parted".
It's just real life continuing to spread on the internet.

You make a good point. When the Alan Jones cash for comments scandal broke, he got absolutely slammed in court for not disclosing who was paying him to promote various things on his show.
The same should apply to tweets. They are broadcasts, and so the people making them should disclose whether it is advertising or not.

Or you could just not be friends with people who will spam you with crap so they can earn 8 cents a week.

You dont understand ho astroturfing works. The goal is transparency and deception. Astroturfing appears as opinion, but is actually scumbag capitalism.

As I understand it, astroturfing doesn't work without people to participate in the process. Don't be friends with those people and you won't have to wonder whether you're hearing opinion or advertising.

The point is that the entire of goal of astroturfing is to make it as hard as possible to distinguish astroturf from genuine opinion. If you can't tell the difference then you can't unfriend only the astroturfers. Especially when the astroturfer realyl is genuine 90% of the time and only schills on rare occasion.

After politely warning them to cease such activity. I cannot understand why there are so many people that want to involve the government in everything, which is what happens when you advocate something you don't like should be made illegal.

A government that doesn't protect the 99% from the 1%, who have consistently shown themselves to embody the most pernicious, sociopathic forms of Randism (which is all of them), is no government worth having.

How do you know Microsoft Office respects your privacy, do you have access to the source?

You don't need it. It runs on your local machine, so you can check every network connection that it makes and, more importantly, you can trivially prevent it from making any network connections.

From what I've heard Microsoft at the very least keeps track of the hardware on which you run its software.

And the reason you know this (it's related to Windows Update, not MS Office specifically) is that people did intercept the data sent to Microsoft from Windows Update and found out exactly what was being sent.

Assuming they are incompetent.For example, the 'microsoft update' scheme is as I understand it run on an unencrypted protocol.There would be nothing stopping office telling the update client to send a few bytes of data along with that stream.

I admit I'm very impressed! I know I'm sticking my neck out depending on the eyes of many others to verify that open source programs such as libreoffice respect privacy, but you relying on the output of a disasembler to reveal all potential downfalls of a program all by your lonesome far exceeds my meager abilities. My hat is off to you!

Ha! Good luck with that disassembler. The output on those things is something between assembly language and vomited up hotdog. You would probably have to search through 10s of millions of lines of the stuff, which could not even be runtime tested, since there is no way in hell you are going to take the output and clean it up enough to recompile it. Also, it is probably not exactly labeled.

This has nothing to do with selling product. This is all about corruptly flooding forums with trolls, thousands of them. The marketing and promotional lie is selling products to friends the reality is poisoning every possible social network with an endless stream of bullshit marketing.

How long will an social site's last when you have a couple of hundred thousand trolls flooding the site with links, desperate to collect a couple of cents per click.

The guy is nothing but another mass trolling pig. Doesn't give a crap about people's social interactions, quite happy to bring them all crashing down, basically he wants to become a social forum spammer and that's what the arse hole is selling to corporations.

You can filter out some IP's but not hundreds of thousands of scattered ones, you can block robots but not hundreds of thousands of pathetic greedy ignorant trolls.

A purveyor of lies on a mass scale. Of course the trolls he employs will become the most hated people on the internet, kicked out of social network after social network.

Are you telling me that this is gonna kill Facebook and Twitter? Really? REALLY?

In previous years, usenet was a social gathering ground on the internet.. being unmoderated was its strength, but also its weakness and Canter & Siegel started a movement that killed it eventually. This has the capability to kill off twitter and facebook sure, but since they both have a controlling entity who could institute moderation then perhaps they can stave off demise by some quick thinking..

It's not Facebook or Twitter that need to react. It's the people who receive the message. I unfollow and unfriend people who post pointless spam, that's the solution. People lose their audience and soon they are worth nothing.

You can filter out some IP's but not hundreds of thousands of scattered ones, you can block robots but not hundreds of thousands of pathetic greedy ignorant trolls.

Which doesn't really matter on a social network. I have a limited number of contacts. If the filters the site use don't work then it's a few seconds work for me to ignore or remove the person who posted it. People have been doing company sponsored advertising for years, the get a free iPad links being one of the more recent examples. Some people

The guy is nothing but another mass trolling pig. Doesn't give a crap about people's social interactions, quite happy to bring them all crashing down, basically he wants to become a social forum spammer and that's what the arse hole is selling to corporations.

The world you're looking for is capitalist or "job creator" if you're Republican. This is practically the history of corporations. Find a new untapped resource and spoil it for everyone else by monetising it in the filthiest way possible until the "evil government" steps in to protect people from the "upstanding businessman" who is "creating wealth".

I fully agree with you, Facebook and Twitter will be entering a war with companies like this if they know what's good for them. This is really no different f

What will happen is simply this: FB will notice that there are people getting paid to spill crap. They'll change their TOS and forbid shilling (at least if you don't pay them for it), a few people will get their account banned and everyone else will cower in fear of being the next and the whole crap stops.

If it worked as well as all that, you might have a case for 'fraud'. But in practice... it really doesn't. It's a fundamental principle of marketing... though people are pretty stupid, they aren't quite as stupid as you'd like them to be. If you go around advertising to your 'friends' on a regular basis, they WILL catch on, even if you try to be sneaky about it. And then you'll have less friends, and you'll have less people to advertise to. You can mitigate this somewhat by being selective, and not bot

What's the problem. This sounds like a revolution in web 2.0 synergies. You win and your friends win by getting vital decision making information regarding the brands they already love. For more information just follow this link?spammer=on&friends=off

i quit reading facebook update because of all of the adds for different games and crap on facebook. all i wanted was to know what my freinds who do not live near me where doing in meatspace now all there is are posts of "look at this funny/inspirational/religious/photoshopped picture some else posted i and i am reposting" and "i am playing a flash game you need to play the flash game to" i don't want to see more freaking adds. can we a decrapafied section of the Internet where we all agree that any spammer

Working on it. First thing to fix: the search engine. I think Google has gotten all the money they are possibly going to get at this point from overlooking SEOs, and should start delisting all of them immediately. Ask the founders to try and find something using their own search engine; when they find it littered with ads, perhaps they will feel motivated to find a way to fix it.

On a separate note, I've been equally annoyed about the Web 2.0, sell your Facebook friends, kind of thing. I have a few friends w

I don't see how any of that is different from having an annoying friend who constantly goes on about his business or keeps handing you leaflets every time you see them. Just tell them you aren't interested, if they keep doing it then tell them it is annoying and ask them to stop. If they don't stop then they are obviously so obnoxious you are probably better off not being friends with them anymore.

According to TFA, this 'social loot' nonsense requires some sort of affiliate ID baked in(presumably to the usual bit of gibberish at the end of the URL) for tracking the spamming performance of their little minions.

With any luck, this should allow automated recognition of people who are astroturfing for these guys and it's always good to have a new way of identifying awful people. At a service level, the astroturf can then be removed, downranked by search engines, etc. At a personal level, we can each do our part by reminding those culprits we know that spammers are abhuman scum who go to the special hell, and deserve it.

Heh, my first thought too was that this is a way to filter people. For otherwise close friends, block their feeds, and have a talk with them in person. For anyone else, instant de-friending. Alternatively, it provides a way to get a list of companies who want to lie their way into your wallet. A useful thing to know and act on.

Not really, most of them will probably be companies you never would have heard of otherwise. This is probably going to work on the same principle as spam. They'll post a million shill messages and if they sell 4 of the product, it'll be consider a "success".

How Internet smart are you? (And, for a bonus point is it correct to capitalize Internet?)

I can see it both ways - the youth will be jaded with familiarity about how the world works (wait - new patent idea = "how the worlds works + ON THE INTERNET") vs the wisdom of the more experienced... I don't have a good sample - my kids, are, well, young(er) AND smart, so I have confounding factors in my data points... but they don't believe half the shit on the Internet as it is. How old is the phrase "caveat empt

Just when you thought all the innovation in spam ideas was over... they hit you with another one. This is only marginally better than the 20,000 or so previous innovative spam ideas, but it's still missing the point of direct advertising on the internet. You're not moving product on the internet unless you're giving people a reason to like you. If they don't like you, they're not going to buy from you. And there's nothing that makes people like you less than spam. Call it social media advertising, call it g

I don't know about Twitter at least, but on Facebook, all the posts came from the Social Loot application. It took all of 5 seconds to "block all posts from Social Loot" to my wall, and now I need never know of its existence (except for Slashdot - thanks guys).

If they are the kind of friend who would push products on you just because they are getting paid then you probably couldn't trust their opinion anyway. Now at least you know. The friends who give you a well reasoned recommendation or information about their personal experience with a product / service can probably be trusted. The 'friends' who send you a referrer link out of the blue probably can't.

You will be able to tell by looking at the address in the address bar after you have followed the link. If it is a standard product page link then great, if it has a load of referrer cruft tagged on to the end of it then you may want to take the recommendation with a pinch of salt.

At the end of the day you can either trust your friends and therefore be safe in the assumption that they have your best interests at heart, or you can't.

...are assigned companies to promote to their circle of online friends.

What a load of crap. "Go promote this crap you may or may not have used or like, and we'll pay you".

I know not everyone shares my belief on this, but the only way I'll endorse or promote your product is if I believe it's a good product and a good value. Mostly, that means I personally use your product and like it, but there are some cases where I know a product is good and popular, but doesn't serve my needs. In that case, I'll still recommend it to people I think will benefit from it. If I don't know your

People have a very low tolerance personal space intrusions. People on the whole have a pretty decent intuition on whether someone genuinely is recommending something vs. is being paid to do so. People also have a pretty good intuition on figuring out who is a paid shill. Anyone who seriously tries to make money from this will quickly find themselves without friends. I can't think of a single friend of mine that would tolerate this shit on their feeds. I hope this gains traction as it will be a quick and easy way to thin out the online social circle.

If this catches on (it won't), you'll just end up with a circle of technically ignorant folks circle-jerking each other for ad revenue while the rest of us get on with our lives.

My opinion is that the kind of 'shill advertising' promoted by Social Loot is about as low as it gets. As a result, I will:a) no longer be recommending you, in fact I will be recommending against purchasing from you (and will explain my reasoning regarding the use of Social Loot)b) no longer consider you for future purchases for myself

I realise I'm just one person. However, I am the 'go to guy' for a number of relatives and friends for technology matters, and based on past experience I am pretty sure that this will cost you a sale every three months or so. Over the course of one year I would estimate lost revenue at AUS$500 - AUS$1000.

If you stop using Social Loot advertising I will be happy to reverse my decision on this matter. Please note I've also cced this email to the Social Loot sales email address - unlike them, and apparently you, I am fine with being honest about my opinions.

GoodonyaMate! and I mean that with sincerity, otherwise I would have said "GoodonYa....Mate!".:)

However the old fart cynic in me says: Good luck competing with "A current affair" and "Today tonight" who have both been shilling these kind of "pocket money" schemes for at least a decade. Then there's "Australia's most read columnist", Andrew Bolt, a shill for God in an Akubra....errr... I mean the minning industry. And who can forget "Australia's most popular talk show host" Alan Jones [blogspot.com.au],[NSFW]*, a convic

This is one of the reasons I quit Facebook, and why I think FB will eventually tank. It won't be long before your wall ends up being nothing but dozens of "posts" from your friends breathlessly raving about cheese-stuffed-something-or-other, or toilet bowl cleaner. Because eventually, if you are on FB, everything you buy is going to be announced to all your FB friends in this way, whether you like it or not.

Heh, I remeber a boss of mine at a small bussiness who caught the Amway bug from a famous cricket player. He came in on Monday and started yammering about it and my first thought was "I'm goinfg to need a new job when is garage is full of the finest stainless steel pots and pans money can buy". Fortunately his wife had more than his ounce of common sense.

If they are doing it for free then it's not astroturf, it's a socially acceptable delusion, it's in the same mold as god, santa, the american dream, the founding fathers, unix for dummies, flying reindeer, and a bottomless sack of loot.

Financially desperate and/or greedy people who cling to the last delusion will always be attracted to the accountanting equivalent of perpetual motion.